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The Curvomatic System for Creating Bentwood Shapes

By Rain Noe - December 19, 2013

in Materials | Hand Tools

Making bent plywood forms is an involved business, even not accounting for the steaming. Industrial practitioners have expensive hydraulic presses, whereas shops making one-offs or limited runs have to construct both male and female purpose-built forms; and the more complicated the final shape, the crazier the clamping process gets.

British company Curvomatic seeks to make bentwood creation easier with its titular product. A series of identical metal extrusions are fitting together into a sort of snakelike fence, in most cases taking the place of the topmost form. The idea behind the multi-pronged solution is to provide even pressure, simplify clamping—in some cases band clamps can be used rather than bar clamps—and save material, for applications where the Curvomatic can supplant the second, concave form.

It also allows you to create curved shapes with undercuts, which would require at least three forms to achieve using conventional methods. Check out the video to see it in action:

I don't have enough experience with creating bentwood forms (exactly zero, to be precise) to comment on the efficacy of the Curvomatic's design, but they have a customer testimony section on their website showing a variety of applications.

You can also check out the boatload of demo videos that Curvomatic has begun posting in the past week.

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guaguagua

11 years ago

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There is this comon mistake between curved plywood and curved solid wood, where people think you have to steam the veneer before gluing it and pressing it. No, veneer is dried out, down to 5-6% moisture content to make a good and stable curved plywood. Curved solid wood is steamed before bending, but the machines bending it are way different.
Back to this machine, it seems nice for one-offs, but would you only have to make 2 or 3 of this big curved counter, buying it from a professionnal would be cheaper and safer in terms of quality of gluing and thickness precision. And I'm not even talking about surface quality if you want to press it with high gloss laminates on the face or anything else than wood. Then again, for one-offs it's probably a good thing, even if you still have to clamp when the parts get too big, because relying on bands doesn't give you enough pressure.
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